Top 20 Survey: Survey methodology

03 Jul 2014, BioSpectrum Bureau , BioSpectrum

This is the seventh edition of the BioSpectrum Asia Pacific Bioscience Industry Survey and the 2014 Survey provides a broad overview, performance, and trends of the bioscience industry in this region. Executed over a period of two months, the survey is limited to publicly listed companies in the bioscience industry in the Asia Pacific region.

BioSpectrum's definition of bioscience includes pharma, biotech, and medtech companies in the region. We followed a twin approach of sending the questionnaire and talking to experts, besides using the financial data of the publicly listed companies from annual reports and information published with the stock exchanges.

The biggest challenge in the entire exercise has been arriving at the figures for the calendar year as several companies have different financial reporting systems.

Further, the data captured is in local currencies and it had to be converted to US dollar equivalent. We sieved through the annual reports of over 400 companies and finally closed our survey for 320 companies that qualified for the $1 million revenue cut-off. We collected the annual reports, quarterly results, half-yearly results, and then arrived at the revenue figures.

The survey covered all the bioscience companies that are listed in the stock exchanges in Asia Pacific, excluding Japan. For all the companies, the revenue for the 12-month period (January to December) for 2013 have been considered for the purpose of ranking and analysis. The exclusions to the calendar year are marked (*).

Some industry figures have been arrived at by extrapolations and estimations due to non-availability of data related to the last quarter of 2013 for Taiwan and China. These extrapolations will be corrected in BioSpectrum data records as and when the data is made available. Similarly, the financial data for some of the top companies in South Korea and Malaysia is not avail- able and hence, these were omitted from this year's survey.

A sample survey of private companies has been factored into the industry survey numbers. The private companies' ecosystem is particularly vibrant in China and India.

The scope of the survey is limited to core bioscience companies spanning the segments of pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and medical devices across Australia-New Zealand, China, India, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. General healthcare and equipment providers are excluded from this survey.

The BioSpectrum research team has used its discretion to make some exceptions to these exclusions keeping in view the industry landscape in various countries.

The countries where exceptions have been made include China, Taiwan, and Malaysia. While the survey spanned all the publicly listed lifescience companies across stock exchanges in Asia, the estimations on private companies were arrived at by a sample survey across countries, corroborated with market estimates from various industry associations and market analysts in respective countries.

The revenue figures across these Asia Pacific markets were standardized to US dollars and the calendar year to arrive at the estimates and the company rankings. The growth has been estimated factoring in currency fluctuation, which is a global market reality today.